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WEEK 6 NEW MEDIA READING QUESTIONS

What information can ethnographic tools give you to improve the interactivity of an online banking website?

  • By using these tools, you can gain insight into the users daily life and how they interact with (in this case) technology. By observing how they navigate other websites and technology, you can determine what areas would be easier or harder for the user to navigate in an online banking website. In addition, by observing their daily life you can determine how important an online banking website would be and whether it would be continually used.

At what point is a design finished? What makes it a success? What is its purpose?

  • The purpose of design is to arrange elements (be it visual or experiential components) to suit a need or function. This means that each design’s purpose changes based on what needs to be accomplished. The design is never finished, rather it usually ends when a purpose is met or lack thereof. This means that there’s always another level or step you can take the design, however there are time constraints, limited money, and limited staff resulting in a design stopping. Whether it is a success or not depends on what the purpose for that design is. You can have the most boring  design, but if it fulfills the purpose then it is a success.

Identify a product family you use regularly (can be anything from technology to consumables except for coffee). How has its branding affected your use, relationship and experience with the product? 

  • A product family I use regularly is apple. Apple is branded as a cohesive creative and prestigious brand and the more I use their products the more critical I become. When you promote things as grand and important as those topics, you have to really make sure that you fulfill those promises. However, the more I use apple the more disappointed I am at its lack of relationship with things outside itself, its need to squeeze every bit of money out of you, and its once prestigious reputation. 
  • In a way its ingenious to prevent communication with other technology brands as it encourages users to buy and equip all apple products. However, considering I’m not rich, I have and use a combination of brands which makes certain components just not work together. Even the smallest things end up becoming a pain, such as the iphone dangle headphone adapter. These things are NOT made to last, resulting in me having to buy a 10-15 dollar new one 2 or 3 times a year (or more). Considering how much of a money powerhouse the company is, it really didn’t seem necessary. Apple used to be seen as the graphic designer’s choice, and was often praised in many ways for being levels above other companies. However as time goes on, other companies are either catching up or outright outpacing apple, providing better and more features than apple. It puts it into perspective when you can not only pay less for other products, but also gain more features, connectability with other brands, as well as many other benefits
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Thoughts on Interaction Design

  • What information can ethnographic tools give you to improve the interactivity of an online banking website? (pp. 48-54)

Ethnographic tools will inform us on how to improve the interactivity of an online banking website by observing how people interact with it in the first place. Ethnography is all about watching how people naturally interact with their surroundings. By doing this, you will be able to see what people struggle with when using the banking website and what they succeed at.

  • At what point is a design finished? What makes it a success? What is its purpose? (pp. 54-62)

A design is never truly finished, there is always room for improvement. However, a design is a success when the user can make sense of it without any struggle. The ultimate purpose of a design is to be easy for the user to work with. Users being able to understand the design and not have any issues with it is its main purpose.

  • Identify a product family you use regularly (can be anything from technology to consumables except for coffee). How has its branding affected your use, relationship and experience with the product? (pp. 78-84)

When I think of a product family that I use regularly, Apple is the first thing to come to my head. Apple branding has affected my use of their products by conditioning me to be able to navigate any of them seamlessly because they are set up very similarly. My relationship with the brand goes way back considering I owned an iPod at a young age. Since then, I have moved onto an iPhone and a MacBook Pro. I have grown up using the Apple brand so it would be jarring to switch to any other for my next phone or laptop. My overall experience with the Apple brand has been positive. My phone and laptop both do what they need to do so there are no complaints from me.

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Thoughts on Interaction Design

Interaction Designers must be able to communicate with various different fields in order to help those fields interact with one another. However, in order to be able to do this effectively, the Interaction Designers must understand each of these fields and know how they relate with one another. The Interaction Designer is tasked with bringing together these different fields such as design, engineering, psychology, art, and many more. The challenges they face are the ones that arise in understanding these fields and then discovering a way to bring them together.

Interaction Design is evolving through the use and ever-improving world of computers. Computers give Interaction Designers a new way to design and improve their work. The Interaction Designers then can draw knowledge from the various different fields that they interact with and help and work for.

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Week 5 interaction design reading

What makes up interaction design and what are some of the industry’s challenges?

Interaction design is made up of a series of steps and processes in the hopes of understanding the audience and how the eventual product you design will affect them.  . One of the challenges the industry faces is the time it takes to commit to this whole process. Explaining to a boss why you need multiple weeks to write stories and scenarios might be a hard sell, especially to someone who isn’t well versed in the field. Another challenge is the difficulty of relating to your audience and understanding their experiences, situations, perceptions, cultural norms, etc.

What is interaction design, how its evolving. What fields does it draw knowledge from?

Interaction design consists of not only a process to design a product, but that process is interwoven into how the user of the product will use and interact with it on a daily basis. As interaction design absorbs techniques and ideas from other fields, it continues to evolve in its process of understanding the user and how they interact with life. As time progresses, certain types of products and design systems are becoming more refined thanks to interaction designers, allowing for more efficient systems and ways of interaction.  

Due to the nature of interaction design and its need for knowledge of its user, interaction design can draw knowledge from marketing, graphic design, industrial design, even UI and UX designers. Interaction design takes the steps these fields use and upgrades them, taking them to the next level to be more intricate, detailed, and suited for conceptual ways of thinking. Often these fields focus too much on the visual aspect of design, whereas interaction design focuses strictly on the conceptual navigation of users.

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Thoughts on Interaction Design Chapters 1 and 2

Interaction design is made of several fields, drawing from graphic design, UI/UX design, web design, and even psychology. Unlike the design-related fields, Interaction Design is less about appearance and more about function. It handles the challenge of experts not properly understanding how someone inexperienced with the material may interact with it. It requires an understanding of the process used by those who are intended to use it. An experienced interaction designer must attempt to view their functions through the eyes of someone new to the content instead of themself because someone experienced will not experience the same troubles a new person would. Though this can be done through self-testing and a plain understanding of others, one evolved method of interaction design testing is creating prototypes and having others test them. It’s growing ever more important to understand how an audience interacts with a product, and it’s especially important to understand how different types of people act too, as everyone has a separate experience. Interaction design, then, is an invaluable asset to any design or product to add easy functionality to everything. Skipping this process may lead to extremely faulty designs, making it essential to modern design.

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Harrison Klehm Summary

This product exists to streamline the process of purchasing gas. Through the use of an app, users will make accounts that allow them to purchase gas must faster than normal. Without even having to insert a card into a machine at a gas station or speak to a cashier, a user may immediately get gas and leave, having the funds be automatically deducted from their account. 

The app offers security, having multiple measures planned so that users cannot have their money abused so easily. Verifications will be in place to prevent this from occurring, while still keeping the process fast.

Additionally, this app will also allow users to view gas prices with ease. Upon opening the app, this information will display first and foremost. Even if a user has no desire to use our quick-payment method, they may make use of the gas price system. No account is needed to track gas prices.

This app also offers a rewards system to allow people to save money on gas, giving a large incentive to use the app and purchase gas through it.

Ultimately, this app’s design will strive to be as simple and straightforward as possible, so that all users may make effective use of it. Whether they use it for time convenience, saving money, or simply learning gas prices, all users must be able to navigate it with ease.

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Thoughts on Interaction Design Chapters 1 & 2

Interaction design is the methodical form of design concerning user experience with a certain creation. Whether that’s a physical or digital item, the personalized needs of the user are addressed in varying forms. The greatest challenges seem to be the complexities throughout the process of designing a proper user interface with the user in mind. There are many variables that dabble in a multitude of studies and mediums, and it is understood that each artist of interaction design is essentially working through a thick shadow of vagueness and points that haven’t been articulated properly.

Interaction design is particularly growing in the direction of post-modern media that functions through types of computers. It draws from the fields of graphic design, psychology, anthropology, marketing, data analytics, ethnography, engineering, and now, website development, as well as other forms of computer software and hardware design and engineering. Its evolution seems to have grown into something increasingly technological, as well as increasingly oriented around products rather than devices or items on their own. There is a significant focus toward marketing language present in the text that illustrates this plainly to me.

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Better Morning Strategy and Scope

After analyzing the numerous issues that presented our protagonist during his morning, my team decided to address the question “What could be made to help make paying for gas easier?” To begin creating a proper strategy for developing a product to best address this question, we defined our business goal which is to develop a product that both encourages new users to implement into their daily lives and creates a channel of communication from the gas companies to our company to the user. To go on to address our goals for our users, we first developed three user profiles to represent the diverse backgrounds of possible users that our product will be targeting-since almost anyone past the age of 16 operates a gas vehicle in today’s market. Another aspect that we considered beyond basic demographics and financial capacity is technical proficiency, which will be necessary to use the app that we are looking to develop. Looking at the diverse backgrounds revealed that most users would have a similar goal when using our product-which would be to get gas easily and for cheap. We would have to adapt our product to be comprehensive to people of all technology proficiencies in order to reach the most ideal market and make it a free-to-use product that is still lucrative to our business.

From there, our team began to narrow our scope for what features we want our product to have. Right now we understand that these features are subject to change as we grow more and more specific, but we determined that we would want three basic functions to begin which are to feature user accounts, an online payment function, and information regarding pricing for gas prices. As we continue to work through a possible Structure for the app, we are understanding that most of the features that we will need will be to make these three main categories of features function-such as shopping carts, databases for user information, account customization, and more which will be defined in greater detail as we further building our skeleton of the app. As our conversations indicate right now, we are hoping to create a system that automatically scans a license plate and charges the user whatever amount their gas is. This way the user will be able to simply pull up to the pump and begin fueling without the need to use a card. We are addressing the possible security issues right now, and are leaning towards registering a permission setting so the user can confirm each payment through the app. One of the greatest obstacles that our team is facing when planning for features is how to best address the need to make an app user-friendly for someone who is not technically proficient. Some ideas proposed suggest perhaps creating a feature outside of the app where the user could register their vehicle for automatic payments inside our participating gas stations. Other ideas proposed involve automatic billing and other paper systems. So far our team has been doing very well at collaborating as we all work to noodle through this new process for thinking, and I am very excited to see where this project goes!

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A Better Morning Strategy

To help create a better and easier morning for the user, our team aims to create an app
that allows for a quick and easy trip through the gas station. With our app we hope to allow the user to set up and account in which they can put money into, then upon arriving at the gas station the pump will recognize the app with the car and allow the user to quickly get started filling their car. We also look to make family or shared accounts for people or family members that share a car.
Another feature we wish to implement into our app is a feed that shows the ever-
changing prices of gas in the area. We believe that this can be a useful feature for the user so they can see an act upon a decrease or increase in gas prices. With this app we hope to create a quicker and easier commute for our users.

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What makes a good game?

There are many things that make a good game. The first and arguably the most important thing is that the rules must be clear and understandable. Players should be able to get a clear understanding on how to start the game, proceed through it, and win. The mechanics of the game are also important. A good game has mechanics that are easy to understand and execute, unique mechanics also can make for a fun game. A game should also have some kind of narrative or goal to draw the person in and make them want to play or continue playing. Finally a game should be fun or enjoyable for the person playing it. Not all games are perfect and some execute these things better than others *cough* *cough* Monopoly but even games that can be frustrating have an appeal that draw us back. Some people also just like to win.

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What Makes a Good Game?

All of the games I’ve played have been memorable ones, but I’ve grown to enjoy some more than others. Thats what a good game should be. A good game is something that brings people together for a fun time. It’s competitive, yet fun. It’s a challenge, yet easy going.

A good game should be easy to learn and play, and made sure it’s tailored to the right audience. Every game should be unique in its own way, and should have new experiences with each play through.

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What makes a good game?

There’s so many technical things that can make a good game. Having simple rules are one of the few things that make a good game. There’s nothing more difficult to starting a game than having rules that don’t make sense or there are too many. I also believe that having too many mechanics can ruin a game as well. There are games that have many mechanics, and are really fun to play, but if there isn’t a purpose to having certain mechanics then it’s a waste to have them.

Ultimately and truthfully, what makes a great game? If you like to play it. Any game that you enjoy playing is a good game. Games that don’t get played are really the ones that aren’t good. If you like playing a game, and you enjoy all the mechanics and the rules are perfect for you, then that makes a good game. Playing games is really important because they’re always a learning experience no matter what. The best games and the good games are the ones that we enjoy playing.

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What makes a good game

What makes a game good can vary from game to game. However, a few things go into making any game good. Clear, understandable rules are required to make a game good. If the rules don’t make sense or aren’t clearly communicated, the game can’t function properly. Also, the mechanics must reflect the metaphor and vice versa. A game with mechanics for fighting enemies wouldn’t work as a game about doctors curing a disease.

Some may say that a game must be fun to be good. However, even disregarding the subjectivity of what is fun, not all games must be fun. Depending on the game’s message, a game might be fun or not. Some more experimental games use lack of fun to great effect.

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What makes a good game?

A good game is made up of players, easy to understand rules, a theme and a comfortable space to play it in. It engages the players to want to come back and play it again. The game and bring about different emotions. It can be funny, serious, difficult, stressful, or exciting. It can be based on luck or strategy but the key element of a good game is engagement. Are players bought into the theme of the game and understanding the rules or are they distracted and confused? The games I keep going back to keep my engagement and allow me to interact with others while I play.